Teaching Design Freedom: Exploring the Effects of Design for Additive Manufacturing Education on the Cognitive Components of Students’ Creativity

Design for manufacturing provides engineers with a structure for accommodating the limitations of traditional manufacturing processes. However, little emphasis is typically given to the capabilities of processes that enable novel design geometries, which are often a point of focus when designing products to be made with additive manufacturing (AM) technologies. In addition, limited research has been conducted to understand how knowledge of both the capabilities (i.e., opportunistic) and limitations (i.e., restrictive aspects) of AM affects design outcomes. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the effect of no, restrictive, and both, opportunistic and restrictive (dual) design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) education on engineering students’ creative process. Based on the componential model of creativity [1], these effects were measured through changes in (1) motivation and interest in AM, (2) DfAM self-efficacy, and (3) the emphasis given to DfAM in the design process. These metrics were chosen as they represent the cognitive components of ‘task-motivation’ and ‘domain relevant skills’, which in turn influence the learning and usage of domain knowledge in creative production. The results of the study show that while the short (45 minute) DfAM intervention did not significantly change student motivation and interest towards AM, students showed high levels of motivation and interest towards AM, before the intervention. Teaching students different aspects of DfAM also resulted in an increase in their self-efficacy in the respective topics. However, despite showing a greater increase in self-efficacy in their respective areas of training, the students did not show differences in the emphasis they gave to these DfAM concepts, in the design process. Further, students from all three education groups showed higher use of restrictive concepts, in comparison to opportunistic DfAM.